The New Yorker articles from May 2006

The New Yorker archives from May 2006

NOT WISE.(The Talk of the Town)(Iraq war)
May 8, 2006... On March 26, 1968, Lyndon Johnson met in the Cabinet Room at the White House with a group of elder statesmen and retired generals known collectively as the Wise Men. He wanted their advice on what to do in Vietnam. They were the architects of...

CHOKE ARTIST.(The Talk of the Town)(Heimlich maneuver)
May 8, 2006... Dr. Henry J. Heimlich, the recently embattled octogenarian inventor (his younger son is campaigning to discredit many of his contributions to medicine), has at least one thing to feel good about this year: his most abiding innovation, the...

SPRUCING UP NIXON.(The Talk of the Town)(Richard Nixon Library)
May 8, 2006... The nine-acre campus of the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace, in Yorba Linda, California, features the thirty-seventh President's boyhood home; his burial site; a gift shop that sells, for $9.95, the "Nixon surf logo beanie"; and a sleek...

STILL KICKING.(The Talk of the Town)(dancers)
May 8, 2006... Maybe you're too young to remember, but in 1942 a man named Lou Walters opened a night club called the Latin Quarter, on the corner of Broadway and Forty-eighth Street, the kind of place that no longer exists, except, in a way that doesn't...

THROUGH THE ROOF.(The Talk of the Town)(insurance industry)
May 8, 2006... On September 2, 1666, fire erupted in a bakery on Pudding Lane in London. The fire quickly spread and raged for four days, ultimately destroying four-fifths of the city. To make matters worse, Londoners had been living without a simple but...

MEMENTO MORI.(notebooks and presents)(Column)
May 8, 2006... For the past ten years or so, I've made it a habit to carry a small notebook in my front pocket. The model I favor is called the Europa, and I pull it out an average of ten times a day, jotting down grocery lists, observations, and little...

CIRCLE OF FIRE.(Muammar Qaddafi)
May 8, 2006... Here's a story they tell in Libya. Three contestants are in a race to run five hundred metres carrying a bag of rats. The first sets off at a good pace, but after a hundred metres the rats have chewed through the bag and spill onto the course....

GOODBYE, COLUMBUS.(The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution)(Book review)
May 8, 2006... What with the noise, the heat, and the danger of being forced back into slavery, sometimes it's good to get out of the city. Such, at least, was the assessment of Harry Washington, who, in July of 1783, made his way to the salty, sunbaked docks...

BRIEFLY NOTED.(poetry)(Book review)
May 8, 2006... Seeing, by Jose Saramago, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa (Harcourt; $25). Saramago's sombre masterpiece "Blindness" had an almost mythic power, whereas his latest novel, a political satire set in the same nameless capital...

HAPPY FACE.(Martha Graham Company)(Dance review)
May 8, 2006... After the terrible troubles that beset Martha Graham's company in the decade after her death, in 1991--fights between the artistic director and the board, a three-year lawsuit, even a brief close-down--the troupe seemed to emerge newborn a few...

HANDEL TIME.
May 8, 2006... There is nothing in music more unstoppably beautiful than a Handel aria moving in slow, regal splendor. It is like a godly machine, crushing all ugliness and plainness in its path. Consider "Ombra mai fu," an ode to a shady tree, from the 1738...

LESS THAN EARNEST.(Oscar Wilde)
May 8, 2006... Of the many joys and miseries that buoyed or afflicted Oscar Wilde's soul, becoming a practicing Catholic was not one. Wilde's mother, the Irish nationalist-leaning poet and critic Lady Jane "Speranza" Wilde, insisted that her son be baptized...

CHOOSING SIDES.(The Proposition)(Army of Shadows)(Movie review)
May 8, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File The new Australian movie "The Proposition" begins with photographs from the late nineteenth century. Here are the stubborn settlers, in stiff collars or lace dresses, bent on transplanting British or Irish...

TABLES FOR TWO.
May 15, 2006... BOHEMIAN HALL AND BEER GARDEN -- 29-19 24th Ave., between 29th and 31st Sts., Astoria (718-274-4925)--Five centuries ago, German brewers began planting trees in their yards to keep the beer cellars below them cool in the summer. Before long,...

POP NOTES.(Living with War)(Sound recording review)
May 15, 2006... COMBAT ROCK -- Weeks after National Guardsmen gunned down four Kent State students, in May, 1970, the pop singer Neil Young recorded "Ohio," blasting the Guard for the shootings. "Living with War" (Reprise), Young's new album, was created with...

SENTENCED.(Zacarias Moussaoui)
May 15, 2006... Against the background of the chronic miasma of fear, tension, suffering, and sporadic but horrifying violence that envelops the world on account of Islamist fundamentalist terrorism and the reaction to it, the fate of Zacarias Moussaoui, the...

THE ONE AND ONLY.(The One: Finding Soul Mate Love and Making It Last)(Book review)
May 15, 2006... The title of Kathy Freston's new book, "The One: Finding Soul Mate Love and Making It Last," speaks to the widely held aspiration that romantic love might be governed by simple formulas; but, as Freston elaborated at a book party held in her...

THE OOPS CON.('Low Life' by Luc Sante)
May 15, 2006... Luc Sante, the author of "Low Life," a book about small-time criminal activity in old New York, left the city six years ago for the Hudson Valley, but the other day he found occasion, from his rustic perch, to comment on the rebirth of the art...

FREQUENT VISITOR.(Alan Bennett)
May 15, 2006... Alan Bennett, the English diarist, playwright, and sometime monologuist, came to town a few weeks ago for the New York premiere of his play "The History Boys." He was oddly calm for a man about to open on Broadway. "When I first came here, with...

A PAINTING'S SECRET.(The Talk of the Town)(secret behind painting of black mariner from 1700s)
May 15, 2006... In 1783, to mark his retirement from the Continental Army, George Washington held a farewell dinner at the Fraunces Tavern, on Pearl Street. Earlier in the war, a crew including a number of skilled black sailors had saved Washington's life by...

THE PERFECT MARK.(advance-fee fraud offered to John W. Worley from Nigeria )
May 15, 2006... Late one afternoon in June, 2001, John W. Worley sat in a burgundy leather desk chair reading his e-mail. He was fifty-seven and burly, with glasses, a fringe of salt-and-pepper hair, and a bushy gray beard. A decorated Vietnam veteran and an...

TITLE IX BABIES.(Ivan Lendl's golfing daughters and athletic discipline)
May 15, 2006... Dayna Ohotnicky is one of the top female golfers at the Torrington Country Club, in northwestern Connecticut. Her parents were both good amateur players, and she learned the game as a child, in the late nineteen-fifties and early sixties. In...

ME MEDIA.(Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook)
May 15, 2006... In August, 1995, when Netscape issued stock on the Nasdaq and became the first major Internet company to go public, Mark Zuckerberg was about to enter the sixth grade at a middle school in Ardsley, a small town in Westchester County. He had a...

CAPTURED ON FILM.(filmmaking in Syria and the Middle East)
May 15, 2006... "On the one side, it's a tragedy that I have made only two feature films in thirty years," the Syrian director Ossama Mohammed told me last month. "Yet, from the other side, I see it as a miracle." We were sitting in the Rawda Cafe, the center...

CRISIS OF FAITH.(Faith Healer)(The Drowsy Chaperone)(Theater review)
May 15, 2006... "The artistic life is a long, lovely suicide," Oscar Wilde said. The aphorism came to mind as I was watching the Gate Theatre production of the four eloquent monologues on the paradox of talent which make up Brian Friel's "Faith Healer"...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
May 15, 2006... A Writer's Life, by Gay Talese (Knopf; $26). In a culture of success and celebrity, Gay Talese has always found his best subjects in failure and decline: Joe DiMaggio in his lonely eclipse; Joshua Logan in the midst of terrible depressions;...

PARADISE SOLD.(Whole Foods Market, Inc., Earthbound Farm)
May 15, 2006... The share price of the Whole Foods Market, Inc., now stands at $62.49. Adjusting for stock splits and dividends, one share would have cost you $2.92 when the company opened on Nasdaq, in January of 1992, so it has done extremely well. Last...

DECORATION MYTHS.(Metropolitan Museum's Betty Woodman retrospective)
May 15, 2006... "Too Matissey," a woman complained while viewing the spectacular Betty Woodman retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum, a show that, on the day that I saw it, piqued a good deal of chat among strangers. The profusion of ceramic vessels and...

SAVE US.(Mission: Impossible III)(Movie review)
May 15, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File The most telling moment in "Mission: Impossible III" occurs near the start. A team of special agents, including Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), has flown to Berlin to rescue Agent Lindsey Farris (Keri Russell),...

TABLES FOR TWO.
May 22, 2006... MOMOFUKU -- 163 First Ave., at 10th St. (212-475-7899)--Momofuku bills itself as a noodle bar, which seems a bit like calling Le Bernardin a crab shack. Its owner and chief ramenhead, David Chang, for one thing, was a nominee for the James...

FUEL DUEL.(The Talk of the Town)(George W. Bush and the energy crisis)
May 22, 2006... Last week was another unhappy one for President Bush. His popularity ratings dropped again; news of chaos and civil war flowed unabated out of Iraq; the appointment of the former head of the N.S.A. as the director of the C.I.A. was jeopardized...

STARS ON STARS.(The Talk of the Town)(parties)
May 22, 2006... Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, was honored by Time last week at a gala dinner for him and ninety-nine other of the world's "most influential" people. The Time 100, as they were called, had been divided into categories that brought to...

ALTMAN ALOFT.(The Talk of the Town)(Interview)
May 22, 2006... In his eighty-second year, Robert Altman is managing to do what he's always done: making films that he wants to make, ignoring anyone else's market-tested notion of what will or won't fly at the box office, and remaining utterly cool. His...

EZ-HOAX.(The Talk of the Town)
May 22, 2006... Shelter Island's first inhabitants, the Manhanset Indians, called their home Manhansack-aha-quash-awomack, which means "an island sheltered by islands"--or, in other words, "take a boat or swim." At least since the days of Nathaniel Sylvester...

HEDGEMONY.(The Talk of the Town)(hedge funds)
May 22, 2006... In the past five years, hedge funds have become a new power on Wall Street; the number of funds has doubled, to more than eight thousand, and the assets they control have tripled, to more than a trillion dollars. In the process, they've also...

HOLLYWOOD HERESY.(The Da Vinci Code, Opus Dei and The Passion of the Christ)
May 22, 2006... In the three years since the publication of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code," a best-selling suspense novel with pretensions to serious scholarship, the work has inspired a vast literature of refutation, including dozens of books and numberless...

THE SEARCH FOR SWEET.
May 22, 2006... The substance in the flask seemed to have all the makings of an excellent insecticide. It was a fine crystalline powder, easy to imagine spraying over a field, and its molecules were full of chlorine atoms, like DDT. To make it, Shashikant...

WHAT THE DOG SAW.(Cesar Milan)
May 22, 2006... In the case of Sugar v. Forman, Cesar Millan knew none of the facts before arriving at the scene of the crime. That is the way Cesar prefers it. His job was to reconcile Forman with Sugar, and, since Sugar was a good deal less adept in making...

AN ENGLISHMAN ABROAD.(Patrick Leigh Fermor)(Biography)
May 22, 2006... On the evening of April 26, 1944, an Opel staff car with slit hoods over its headlamps set off toward Knossos. To people who know Crete, Knossos refers to the myth-haunted remnants of the lost Minoan civilization on the northern shores of the...

90% HATEFUL.(The Possibility of an Island)(Book review)
May 22, 2006... It is to the credit of the French novelist, poet, and provocateur Michel Houellebecq that, in his new novel, "The Possibility of an Island" (translated from the French by Gavin Bowd; Knopf; $24.95), he so boldly, with considerable energy and...

DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL.(Desperate Networks)(Book review)
May 22, 2006... The past dozen years have been the most convulsive in television history. The four major networks' share of the viewing audience has fallen from seventy-two per cent to forty-six. As the HBO hits "The Sopranos" and "Deadwood" made even the best...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
May 22, 2006... The Attack, by Yasmina Khadra, translated from the French by John Cullen (Doubleday; $18.95). Dr. Amin Jaafari, an Israeli Arab, seems fully assimilated into Tel Aviv society, with a loving wife, a successful career as a surgeon, and numerous...

SHINING HOURS.(Shining City)(Theater review)
May 22, 2006... Of the many images that the prolific actor and director Charles Laughton left behind in his relatively brief lifetime--production stills, head shots, off-the-cuff newspaper photographs--the most effective are Carl Van Vechten's 1940 portraits...

SINK OR SWIM.(Poseidon)(Movie review)
May 22, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File Wolfgang Petersen, the director of "Das Boot" and "The Perfect Storm," is back in the water. In "Poseidon," a remake of "The Poseidon Adventure," the German-born Petersen swamps a ship, sends rivets...

TABLES FOR TWO.
May 29, 2006... MORIMOTO AND BUDDAKAN -- 80 Tenth Ave., between 15th and 16th Sts. (212-989-8883); 75 Ninth Ave., at 16th St. (212-989-6699)--In January, just before making his Manhattan debut with these two supersized eateries, the Philadelphia restaurateur...

THE LETTER.(The Talk of the Town)(Mahmoud Ahmadinejad)
May 29, 2006... The epistle that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the more or less duly elected President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, sent George W. Bush, the more or less duly elected President of the United States of America, a couple of weeks ago has achieved a...

LISTENING IN.(The Talk of the Town)(National Security Agency)
May 29, 2006... A few days before the start of the confirmation hearings for General Michael Hayden, who has been nominated by President Bush to be the head of the C.I.A., I spoke to an official of the National Security Agency who recently retired. The...

SHADY HILL GANG.(The Talk of the Town)
May 29, 2006... The hip-hop class for seventh and eighth graders at Shady Hill, a private school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, takes place just after lunch on Tuesdays and Fridays. The class, a practicum in the basics of rapping, is taught by a Cambridge...

BIG HOUSES.(The Talk of the Town)
May 29, 2006... These have been wild years for New York real estate, and with building limited, as ever, to either up or over, instead of out, condo and co-op conversions keep getting more creative. (The list includes not only warehouses, schools, and churches...

WANNA BUY A PICASSO?(The Talk of the Town)(Roustam Tariko)(Interview)
May 29, 2006... Last month at Sotheby's, Picasso's "Dora Maar with Cat" was purchased for ninety-five million dollars by an unidentified Russian man. The art world and the press immediately started speculating about the buyer's identity, and within a few days...

PRIVATE JIHAD.(Rita Katz, head of Search for International Terrorist Entities)(Interview)
May 29, 2006... Rita Katz is tiny and dark, with volatile brown eyes, and when she is nervous or excited she can't sit still. She speaks in torrents, ten minutes at a stretch. Everybody who works in intelligence calls her Rita, even people who don't know her...

THE ICE RENAISSANCE.(St. Petersburg)
May 29, 2006... St. Petersburg was a bog on the Gulf of Finland until, in 1703, Peter the Great decided to transform it into an imperial capital, and conscripted more than seven hundred thousand Russian subjects to clear the forests, level the hills, drain the...

RUFFLED FEATHERS.(Pamela Rasmussen)(Biography)
May 29, 2006... On a wintry evening in January, the Smithsonian threw a book party in the Castle--a turreted folly on the Mall, in Washington, D.C.--to celebrate Pamela Rasmussen's monumental new work, "Birds of South Asia: The Ripley Guide," which had...

CENTRAL CASTING.(congressional elections)
May 29, 2006... An enduring predicament of the Democratic Party was revealed one day in August, 2004, when John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for President, and John Edwards, the nominee for Vice-President, visited a soybean-and-cattle farm outside Smithville,...

HEAVEN CAN WAIT.(The Da Vinci Code)(Movie review)
May 29, 2006... Movie Listings The Film File The story of "The Da Vinci Code" goes like this. A dead Frenchman is found laid out on the floor of the Louvre. His final act was to carve a number of bloody markings into his own flesh, indicating, to the...

BIG BIRD.(Mockingbird)(Book review)
May 29, 2006... "Harper Lee is the moral conscience of the film," Bennett Miller, the director of "Capote," explains in an interview included on the movie's DVD. "We were looking for an actor who had composure and dignity and a maturity of spirit and a...

BRIEFLY NOTED.
May 29, 2006... Elements of Style, by Wendy Wasserstein (Knopf; $23.95). The playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who died earlier this year, had the rare ability to be sardonic and compassionate at once--a talent put to the test in this novel about the goofy...

BLOOD AND PAINT.(Theft: A Love Story)(Book review)
May 29, 2006... Why, I have sometimes wondered, has the very brilliant, very Australian novelist Peter Carey chosen to live, since 1990, in New York City? Perhaps, I reasoned, it was to gain the exile's significant artistic advantage of enhancement through...

GAME THEORY.(The Wages of Wins)(Book review)
May 29, 2006... The first player picked in the 1996 National Basketball Association draft was a slender, six-foot guard from Georgetown University named Allen Iverson. Iverson was thrilling. He was lightning quick, and could stop and start on a dime. He would...

MOLTO PIANO.(Whitney Museum of American Art)
May 29, 2006... Renzo Piano comes from a family of builders in Genoa, and his firm is called Renzo Piano Building Workshop, as if he weren't a superstar architect but just your friendly neighborhood problem solver. Unlike most other architectural stars, Piano...